Introduction to English Morphology

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words, word-formation mechanisms that give rise to new words, and mechanisms that produce wordforms of existing words. Intended as a companion for students of English language and linguistics at both B.A. and M.A. levels, this textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of English morphology, including English word-formation and English inflectional morphology. The textbook discusses not only basic introductory issues requiring no prior background in linguistics but also fairly controversial theoretical issues which different linguists treat in a different way. As in the previous volumes of the TELL Series, most of the analyses are illustrated with authentic language data, i.e. examples drawn from language corpora like the Corpus of Contemporary American English and British National Corpus.

Alexander Tokar, born in 1980 in Kursk (Russia), is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Düsseldorf (Germany). He obtained his doctoral degree in English linguistics from the University of Düsseldorf in December 2008 with a dissertation on (published by Peter Lang in 2009). His main research interests are morphology, phraseology, semantics and pragmatics, phonetics and phonology, and cognitive linguistics.

Leseprobe

Contents: The Distribution of Morphs – Morphemes as Signs – The Segmentation of Words into Morphemes – Affixes Versus Roots – Isomorphic and Anisomorphic Lexemes – Word-Formation – Lexeme-Formation versus Lex-Formation – The Establishment of New Lexemes – Semantic Change – Lexeme-Manufacturing – Borrowing – Affixation – Apophony – Compounding – Blending – Back-Formation – Inflectional Morphology – Grammatical Categories.